The Opposition

Important Issues

1988 Uprising and 1990 Election

8888 Protests in Rangoon

_The rule of General Ne Win, and his
‘Burmese Way to Socialism, had turned Burma, once expected to become one of the
fastest developing Asian Tigers of the region, into one of the poorest
countries in the world. Sporadic protests against the military government had
broken out several times since Ne Win took power in 1962, but these were always
brutally suppressed. In 1988, there was growing resentment towards military
rule – further exasperated by police brutality, economic mismanagement and
corruption within the government – but there were no channels to address these
grievances. All this lead to widespread pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988,
known as the 8888 Uprising.
The uprising was started by students in
Rangoon on 8 August 1988 (‘8888’), and protests quickly spread throughout the
country. Hundreds of thousands of monks, young children, university students,
housewives, and doctors demonstrated against the regime. The uprising ended on
18 September 1988, after a bloody military coup by the State Law and Order
Restoration Council (SLORC). Thousands of people were reportedly killed by the
military during the uprising, although Burmese authorities put the figure at
around 350 people killed.

Early
Protests – March-July
The protest movement began on 12 March
1988 when students from the Rangoon Institute of Technology (RIT) got into an
argument with some other students at a local tea shop. One of the students, the
son of a Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) official, was arrested for
injuring one of the RIT students, but was later released without charges. In
response to student protests at a local police department, 500 riot police were
mobilised, and in the ensuing clash one student was shot and killed. The
incident angered pro-democracy groups and the next day more students rallied both
at RIT and at other campuses. These students had never protested before but now
began to see themselves as activists.
By mid-March, several protests had
occurred and there was open dissent in the army. On March 16, students
demanding an end to one-party rule were marching towards soldiers at Inya Lake
in Rangoon when riot police stormed them from the rear, clubbing several
students to death and raping others. Several students recalled the police
shouting "Don't let them escape" and "Kill them!"[1]
Following these protests the regime
announced the closure of universities for several months. By June 1988, large
demonstrations of students and other pro-democracy sympathisers were seen daily
and the protests spread from Rangoon throughout Burma, demanding multi-party
democracy. On 23 July 1988, Ne Win, in an attempt to calm the situation,
announced that he was resigning as BSPP party chairman. He promised a
multi-party system, but had appointed the much disliked Sein Lwin, known as the
‘Butcher of Rangoon’, to lead the new government. In an address on 23 July 1988
he ominously warned, “When the army shoots, it shoots to kill.” [2]

_Main
Protests – August 1988
In August of 1988 the protests reached
their peak. A nationwide demonstration was planned for 8 August 1988 (8-8-88),
an auspicious date based on numerological significance. Between 2 and 10
August, coordinated protests occurred in most Burmese towns, including in rural
areas, students across the country were denouncing Sein Lwin’s regime, and Tatmadaw (the Burmese Army) troops were
mobilised.
In the first few days of the Rangoon
protests, activists contacted lawyers and monks in Mandalay to encourage them
to take part in the protests. The students were quickly joined by a diverse
group of Burmese citizens, including government workers, Buddhist monks, military
personnel, customs officers, teachers, and hospital staff. 10,000 people alone
demonstrated outside the Sule Pagoda in Rangoon. On 3 August, the junta imposed
martial law and instituted a ban on gatherings of more than five people.
A general strike began as planned on 8
August 1988 and mass demonstrations were held across Burma, with ethnic
minorities, Buddhists, Muslims, students, and workers, young and old, all
participating. Over the next four days these demonstrations continued and the
marches would occur daily until 19 September. The regime was surprised by the
scale of the protests and promised to listen to the demands of the protesters
“insofar as possible”. [3]
At the same time, Sein Lwin brought in more soldiers from insurgent areas to
deal with the protesters, and a short time later they opened fire on the
protesters. Ne Win ordered that “guns were not to shoot upwards”, meaning that he
was ordering the military to shoot directly at protesters. [4]
On 10 August soldiers fired into Rangoon General Hospital, killing nurses and
doctors treating wounded protestors. State-run Radio Rangoon reported that
1,451 “looters and disturbance-makers” had been arrested.

8888 Uprising

_On 12 August Sein Lwin suddenly resigned,
an event that left many protestors confused but cheerful. Security forces
exercised greater caution with demonstrators and on 19 August Ne Win’s
biographer, Dr. Maung Maung, was appointed as head of the government. Maung was
a legal scholar and the only non-military person to serve in the BSPP.
The appointment of Maung briefly calmed the
situation, but nationwide protests resumed on 22 August. In Mandalay 100,000
people demonstrated, including Buddhist monks, and 50,000 demonstrated in
Sittwe. Large marches took place to distant ethnic states, particularly where
military campaigns had previously taken place. Doctors, monks, musicians,
actors, lawyers, army veterans and government office workers joined the
protests.

_On 26 August, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was
in Rangoon on a visit from Oxford to care for her sick mother and had not
previously taken part in the demonstrations, entered the political arena, giving
a speech in front of 500,000 people at the Shwedagon Pagoda. It was at this
point that she became a symbol for the struggle for democracy in Burma. As the
daughter of General Aung San, the so-called father of Burmese independence, she
appeared for many to be the natural leader of the pro-democracy movement. She
urged the crowd not to turn on the army, but to find peace through non-violent
means.

Many other former democracy leaders
returned to the scene around the same time, including former Prime Minister U
Nu (PM January 1948-June 1956) and retired Brigadier General Aung Gyi, in what
was described as a “democracy summer”. Despite this, Ne Win remained in the
background.

September
1988
During the September Party Congress in
1988, 90% of the party delegates voted for a multi-party system of government.
The BSPP announced that they would be organising an election, but the
opposition called for the immediate resignation of the government, and for an
interim government to organise the elections. The BSPP rejected both demands,
and protesters again took to the streets on 12 September.
By mid-September the protesters grew
more violent and lawless, with soldiers deliberately leading protesters into
clashes that the army easily won. Protesters demanded more immediate change,
and distrusted steps for incremental reform.

_SLORC
Coup d’État and CrackdownOn 18 September, the 8888 Uprising came
to an end when the military, led by General Saw Maung, retook power in a coup
d’état. General Maung established the State Law and Order Restoration Council
(SLORC), imposing more draconian measures than those of Ne Win. After martial
law was imposed, protests were violently broken up. The government announced on
the state-run radio that the military had assumed power in the interest of the
people, "in order
to bring a timely halt to the deteriorating conditions on all sides all over
the country”. [5]Tatmadaw troops indiscriminately
fired on protestors in cities throughout Burma, and within the first week of
securing power, 1,000 students, monks and schoolchildren were killed and
another 500 were killed protesting outside the US embassy (the event was caught
by a cameraman nearby who distributed the footage to the world’s media).
Protestors were pursued into the jungle and some students went to the
Thai-Burma border for training.

By the end of
September, around 3,000 people had been killed, with 1,000 dead in Rangoon
alone, and an unknown number had been injured. At this time, Aung San Suu Kyi
appealed for help.

_"I would like every country in the world to recognize the fact that the people of Burma are being shot down for no reason at all." -Aung
San Suu Kyi, 22 September 1988

_However, by 21 September the military had regained control,
and the pro-democracy movement effectively collapsed in October. By the end of
1988, an estimated 10,000 people, including protesters and soldiers, had been
killed, and many others were missing.

_1990
Elections
In May 1990, after huge international
and national pressure, the military junta arranged free elections for the first
time in 30 years. The National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu
Kyi, won 80% of the seats in Parliament (398 out of 447). However, the military
junta, surprised by such a landslide victory for the opposition, annulled the
results of the election and refused to hand over power. Many members of the NLD
and other opposition groups were arrested, and Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under
house arrest in Rangoon; she would remain under house arrest for 15 of the next
21 years, until November 2010. Aung San Suu Kyi has continued to advocate
non-violence as the best way to achieve lasting political change, and is
currently running for a seat in Parliament in the upcoming by-elections on 1
April 2012.